[in-enaction] reviews: The Architecture of Happiness

THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS
By Alain de Botton.

Illustrated. 280 pp. Pantheon Books. $25.

It is because architecture is an essentially public art that we need 
some shared sense of architectural value. Do we want to live amid the 
rationally ordered boulevards of Paris, or the complexity and 
contradiction of the Vegas Strip? Is less more, or a bore? Will a new 
museum in the form of a gigantic titanium-clad blob transform our 
backwater hometown into an exciting cultural capital? Can the right sort 
of architecture even improve our character?

These are the sort of reflections prompted by Alain de Botton’s latest 
book, “The Architecture of Happiness.” De Botton, a young author of 
briskly selling meditations on such themes as status anxiety, travel and 
the life-changing power of Proust, here turns his attention to 
architecture, pondering the question of just what are the elusive 
qualities that make one building beautiful and another hideous.

cont'd....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Holt.t.html?ref=books